Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Summary
Nine stories about Indian and Indian American lives, most of them turning on something that does not get said.
In the title story a tour guide drives an American family to the sun temple at Konarak. He spends his weekdays interpreting patients' symptoms for a doctor who does not speak their language, and the wife in the back seat, hearing this, decides he is the person to whom she can finally confess something she has carried for years. He is flattered, then appalled.
In the first story a young couple in Boston, barely speaking since a stillbirth, learn that the power will be cut for an hour each evening for five days, and in the dark they start telling each other small truths, which is either the beginning of a repair or the end of a marriage. Elsewhere a woman in a Cambridge apartment cooks fish and cannot learn to drive, and a man arriving in 1969 lodges with a hundred and three year old landlady who wants to hear about the moon landing.
The best of them may be the last. A young man arrives in Boston in 1969 with a suitcase, takes a room from a hundred and three year old landlady who will only discuss the moon landing, and waits for a wife he has met once to arrive from Calcutta. Nothing dramatic occurs and it is quietly overwhelming.
Lahiri writes plainly and at normal speed, with no tricks and no showing off, and the effect is that you do not notice the craft until a story lands. Each runs about twenty pages, and the collection is under two hundred.
She is unsentimental about arranged marriages, homesickness and the second generation, refusing both the tragedy and the celebration a reader might expect. Best for readers who want quiet, exact fiction, and a very good entry point for anyone who thinks they do not enjoy short stories.
Historical Context & Significance
Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, she was thirty two, and awarding the fiction prize to a debut story collection is close to unheard of. It also took the PEN Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction and was named the New Yorker's best debut of the year.
Lahiri was the first writer of Indian descent to win the fiction Pulitzer. Born in London to Bengali parents and raised in Rhode Island, she has said she was regularly asked, after the prize, to account for a whole diaspora on the strength of nine stories.
She followed it with the novel The Namesake, filmed by Mira Nair in 2006, and later moved to Rome and began writing in Italian, publishing In Other Words and Whereabouts in a language she learned as an adult.